OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Review of Prototyping in XR: Linking Extended Reality to Digital Fabrication
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Extended Reality (XR) has expanded the horizons of entertainment and social life and shows great potential in the manufacturing industry. Prototyping in XR can help designers make initial proposals and iterations at low cost before manufacturers and investors decide whether to invest in research, development or even production. According to the literature (54 manuscripts in the last 15 years) prototyping in XR in XR is easier to use than three-dimensional (3D) modeling with a personal computer and more capable of displaying 3D structures than paper drawing. In this comprehensive review, we systematically surveyed the literature on prototyping in XR and discussed the possibility of transferring created virtual prototypes from XR to commonly used 3D modeling software and reality. We proposed five research questions regarding prototyping in XR. They are: what the constituent elements and workflow of prototyping are; which display devices can deliver satisfying immersive and interactive experiences; how user control input is obtained and what methods are available for users to interact with virtual elements and create XR prototypes; what approaches can facilitate the connection with fabrication to ensure a smooth transition from the virtual to the physical world; and what the challenges are and what the future holds for this research domain. Based on these questions, we summarized the components and workflows of prototyping in XR. Moreover, we present an overview of the latest trends in display device evolution, control technologies, digital model construction, and manufacturing processes. In view of these latest developments and gaps, we speculated on the challenges and opportunities in the field of prototyping in XR, especially in linking extended reality to digital fabrication, with the aim of guiding researchers towards new research directions.
Quantifying Personality in Human-Drone Interactions for Building Heat Loss Inspection with Virtual Reality Training
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Reliable building energy audits are crucial for efficiency through heat loss detection. While drones assist inspections, they overlook the interplay between personality traits, stress management, and operational strategies expert engineers employ. This gap, combined with workforce shortages, necessitates effective knowledge transfer. This study proposes a VR-based training system for human-drone interaction in building heat loss inspection. Participants piloted a virtual drone with a thermographic monitor to identify defects. By analyzing flight patterns, stress adaptation, and inspection performance across diverse trainees, we found: (1) Flight Trajectories - Extraverts, Intuitives, Feelers, and Perceivers explored larger areas but showed higher misclassification rates, while Introverts, Sensors, Thinkers, and Judgers demonstrated methodical approaches. (2) Stress Adaptation - Heart rate variability revealed broader stress fluctuations among Extraverts, Intuitives, Feelers, and Perceivers, whereas Introverts, Sensors, Thinkers, and Judgers maintained steadier responses. Task complexity magnified these differences. (3) Inspection Performance - Extraverts, Intuitives, and Feelers achieved higher recall but over-identified defects. Introverts, Sensors, Thinkers, and Judgers made fewer random errors but risked overlooking subtle heat losses. These insights highlight the interplay among personality traits, stress management, and operational strategies in VR training for drone-assisted audits. The framework shows potential for addressing workforce shortages by facilitating knowledge transfer and optimizing human-drone collaboration.
HALO: Human-Aligned End-to-end Image Retargeting with Layered Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Image retargeting aims to change the aspect-ratio of an image while maintaining its content and structure with less visual artifacts. Existing methods still generate many artifacts or fail to maintain original content or structure. To address this, we introduce HALO, an end-to-end trainable solution for image retargeting. Since humans are more sensitive to distortions in salient areas than non-salient areas of an image, HALO decomposes the input image into salient/non-salient layers and applies different wrapping fields to different layers. To further minimize the structure distortion in the output images, we propose perceptual structure similarity loss which measures the structure similarity between input and output images and aligns with human perception. Both quantitative results and a user study on the RetargetMe dataset show that HALO achieves SOTA. Especially, our method achieves an 18.4% higher user preference compared to the baselines on average.
How to Adapt Control Barrier Functions? A Learning-Based Approach with Applications to a VTOL Quadplane
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we present a novel theoretical framework for online adaptation of Control Barrier Function (CBF) parameters, i.e., of the class K functions included in the CBF condition, under input constraints. We introduce the concept of locally validated CBF parameters, which are adapted online to guarantee finite-horizon safety, based on conditions derived from Nagumo's theorem and tangent cone analysis. To identify these parameters online, we integrate a learning-based approach with an uncertainty-aware verification process that account for both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties inherent in neural network predictions. Our method is demonstrated on a VTOL quadplane model during challenging transition and landing maneuvers, showcasing enhanced performance while maintaining safety.
Adaptive Finite State Projection with Quantile-Based Pruning for Solving the Chemical Master Equation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2025
Year: 2025

We present an adaptive Finite State Projection (FSP) method for efficiently solving the Chemical Master Equation (CME) with rigorous error control. Our approach integrates time-stepping with dynamic state-space truncation, balancing accuracy and computational cost. Krylov subspace methods approximate the matrix exponential, while quantile-based pruning controls state-space growth by removing low-probability states. Theoretical error bounds ensure that the truncation error remains bounded by the pruned mass at each step, which is user-controlled, and does not propagate forward in time. Numerical experiments on biochemical systems, including the Lotka-Volterra and Michaelis-Menten and bi-stable toggle switch models.
How I Warped Your Noise: a Temporally-Correlated Noise Prior for Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Video editing and generation methods often rely on pre-trained image-based diffusion models. During the diffusion process, however, the reliance on rudimentary noise sampling techniques that do not preserve correlations present in subsequent frames of a video is detrimental to the quality of the results. This either produces high-frequency flickering, or texture-sticking artifacts that are not amenable to post-processing. With this in mind, we propose a novel method for preserving temporal correlations in a sequence of noise samples. This approach is materialized by a novel noise representation, dubbed $\int$-noise (integral noise), that reinterprets individual noise samples as a continuously integrated noise field: pixel values do not represent discrete values, but are rather the integral of an underlying infinite-resolution noise over the pixel area. Additionally, we propose a carefully tailored transport method that uses $\int$-noise to accurately advect noise samples over a sequence of frames, maximizing the correlation between different frames while also preserving the noise properties. Our results demonstrate that the proposed $\int$-noise can be used for a variety of tasks, such as video restoration, surrogate rendering, and conditional video generation. See https://warpyournoise.github.io/ for video results.
Integrating Identity-Based Identification against Adaptive Adversaries in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving, distributed machine learning. However, FL systems face significant security threats, particularly from adaptive adversaries capable of modifying their attack strategies to evade detection. One such threat is the presence of Reconnecting Malicious Clients (RMCs), which exploit FLs open connectivity by reconnecting to the system with modified attack strategies. To address this vulnerability, we propose integration of Identity-Based Identification (IBI) as a security measure within FL environments. By leveraging IBI, we enable FL systems to authenticate clients based on cryptographic identity schemes, effectively preventing previously disconnected malicious clients from re-entering the system. Our approach is implemented using the TNC-IBI (Tan-Ng-Chin) scheme over elliptic curves to ensure computational efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments like Internet of Things (IoT). Experimental results demonstrate that integrating IBI with secure aggregation algorithms, such as Krum and Trimmed Mean, significantly improves FL robustness by mitigating the impact of RMCs. We further discuss the broader implications of IBI in FL security, highlighting research directions for adaptive adversary detection, reputation-based mechanisms, and the applicability of identity-based cryptographic frameworks in decentralized FL architectures. Our findings advocate for a holistic approach to FL security, emphasizing the necessity of proactive defence strategies against evolving adaptive adversarial threats.
From Questions to Insights: Exploring XAI Challenges Reported on Stack Overflow Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2025
Year: 2025

The lack of interpretability is a major barrier that limits the practical usage of AI models. Several eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques (e.g., SHAP, LIME) have been employed to interpret these models' performance. However, users often face challenges when leveraging these techniques in real-world scenarios and thus submit questions in technical Q&A forums like Stack Overflow (SO) to resolve these challenges. We conducted an exploratory study to expose these challenges, their severity, and features that can make XAI techniques more accessible and easier to use. Our contributions to this study are fourfold. First, we manually analyzed 663 SO questions that discussed challenges related to XAI techniques. Our careful investigation produced a catalog of seven challenges (e.g., disagreement issues). We then analyzed their prevalence and found that model integration and disagreement issues emerged as the most prevalent challenges. Second, we attempt to estimate the severity of each XAI challenge by determining the correlation between challenge types and answer metadata (e.g., the presence of accepted answers). Our analysis suggests that model integration issues is the most severe challenge. Third, we attempt to perceive the severity of these challenges based on practitioners' ability to use XAI techniques effectively in their work. Practitioners' responses suggest that disagreement issues most severely affect the use of XAI techniques. Fourth, we seek agreement from practitioners on improvements or features that could make XAI techniques more accessible and user-friendly. The majority of them suggest consistency in explanations and simplified integration. Our study findings might (a) help to enhance the accessibility and usability of XAI and (b) act as the initial benchmark that can inspire future research.
Scaling Open-Vocabulary Action Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we focus on scaling open-vocabulary action detection. Existing approaches for action detection are predominantly limited to closed-set scenarios and rely on complex, parameter-heavy architectures. Extending these models to the open-vocabulary setting poses two key challenges: (1) the lack of large-scale datasets with many action classes for robust training, and (2) parameter-heavy adaptations to a pretrained vision-language contrastive model to convert it for detection, risking overfitting the additional non-pretrained parameters to base action classes. Firstly, we introduce an encoder-only multimodal model for video action detection, reducing the reliance on parameter-heavy additions for video action detection. Secondly, we introduce a simple weakly supervised training strategy to exploit an existing closed-set action detection dataset for pretraining. Finally, we depart from the ill-posed base-to-novel benchmark used by prior works in open-vocabulary action detection and devise a new benchmark to evaluate on existing closed-set action detection datasets without ever using them for training, showing novel results to serve as baselines for future work. Our code is available at https://siatheindochinese.github.io/sia_act_page/ .
MORAL: A Multimodal Reinforcement Learning Framework for Decision Making in Autonomous Laboratories
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We propose MORAL (a multimodal reinforcement learning framework for decision making in autonomous laboratories) that enhances sequential decision-making in autonomous robotic laboratories through the integration of visual and textual inputs. Using the BridgeData V2 dataset, we generate fine-tuned image captions with a pretrained BLIP-2 vision-language model and combine them with visual features through an early fusion strategy. The fused representations are processed using Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal agents achieve a 20% improvement in task completion rates and significantly outperform visual-only and textual-only baselines after sufficient training. Compared to transformer-based and recurrent multimodal RL models, our approach achieves superior performance in cumulative reward and caption quality metrics (BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE-L). These results highlight the impact of semantically aligned language cues in enhancing agent learning efficiency and generalization. The proposed framework contributes to the advancement of multimodal reinforcement learning and embodied AI systems in dynamic, real-world environments.
Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for knowledge injection during large language model (LLM) inference in recent years. However, due to their limited ability to exploit fine-grained inter-document relationships, current RAG implementations face challenges in effectively addressing the retrieved noise and redundancy content, which may cause error in the generation results. To address these limitations, we propose an Efficient Dynamic Clustering-based document Compression framework (EDC2-RAG) that utilizes latent inter-document relationships while simultaneously removing irrelevant information and redundant content. We validate our approach, built upon GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, on widely used knowledge-QA and Hallucination-Detection datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent performance improvements across various scenarios and experimental settings, demonstrating strong robustness and applicability. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/EDC-2-RAG.
REJEPA: A Novel Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Efficient Remote Sensing Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The rapid expansion of remote sensing image archives demands the development of strong and efficient techniques for content-based image retrieval (RS-CBIR). This paper presents REJEPA (Retrieval with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture), an innovative self-supervised framework designed for unimodal RS-CBIR. REJEPA utilises spatially distributed context token encoding to forecast abstract representations of target tokens, effectively capturing high-level semantic features and eliminating unnecessary pixel-level details. In contrast to generative methods that focus on pixel reconstruction or contrastive techniques that depend on negative pairs, REJEPA functions within feature space, achieving a reduction in computational complexity of 40-60% when compared to pixel-reconstruction baselines like Masked Autoencoders (MAE). To guarantee strong and varied representations, REJEPA incorporates Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularisation (VICReg), which prevents encoder collapse by promoting feature diversity and reducing redundancy. The method demonstrates an estimated enhancement in retrieval accuracy of 5.1% on BEN-14K (S1), 7.4% on BEN-14K (S2), 6.0% on FMoW-RGB, and 10.1% on FMoW-Sentinel compared to prominent SSL techniques, including CSMAE-SESD, Mask-VLM, SatMAE, ScaleMAE, and SatMAE++, on extensive RS benchmarks BEN-14K (multispectral and SAR data), FMoW-RGB and FMoW-Sentinel. Through effective generalisation across sensor modalities, REJEPA establishes itself as a sensor-agnostic benchmark for efficient, scalable, and precise RS-CBIR, addressing challenges like varying resolutions, high object density, and complex backgrounds with computational efficiency.
Think When You Need: Self-Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying problem complexity. Our approach constructs rewards through length and quality comparisons, guided by theoretical assumptions that jointly enhance solution correctness with conciseness. Moreover, we further demonstrate our method to fuzzy tasks where ground truth is unavailable. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method maintains accuracy while generating significantly more concise explanations, effectively teaching models to "think when needed."
Enhancing Traffic Incident Response through Sub-Second Temporal Localization with HybridMamba
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Traffic crash detection in long-form surveillance videos is essential for improving emergency response and infrastructure planning, yet remains difficult due to the brief and infrequent nature of crash events. We present \textbf{HybridMamba}, a novel architecture integrating visual transformers with state-space temporal modeling to achieve high-precision crash time localization. Our approach introduces multi-level token compression and hierarchical temporal processing to maintain computational efficiency without sacrificing temporal resolution. Evaluated on a large-scale dataset from the Iowa Department of Transportation, HybridMamba achieves a mean absolute error of \textbf{1.50 seconds} for 2-minute videos ($p<0.01$ compared to baselines), with \textbf{65.2%} of predictions falling within one second of the ground truth. It outperforms recent video-language models (e.g., TimeChat, VideoLLaMA-2) by up to 3.95 seconds while using significantly fewer parameters (3B vs. 13--72B). Our results demonstrate effective temporal localization across various video durations (2--40 minutes) and diverse environmental conditions, highlighting HybridMamba's potential for fine-grained temporal localization in traffic surveillance while identifying challenges that remain for extended deployment.
Malware Detection in Docker Containers: An Image is Worth a Thousand Logs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Malware detection is increasingly challenged by evolving techniques like obfuscation and polymorphism, limiting the effectiveness of traditional methods. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of software containers has introduced new security challenges, including the growing threat of malicious software injection, where a container, once compromised, can serve as entry point for further cyberattacks. In this work, we address these security issues by introducing a method to identify compromised containers through machine learning analysis of their file systems. We cast the entire software containers into large RGB images via their tarball representations, and propose to use established Convolutional Neural Network architectures on a streaming, patch-based manner. To support our experiments, we release the COSOCO dataset--the first of its kind--containing 3364 large-scale RGB images of benign and compromised software containers at https://huggingface.co/datasets/k3ylabs/cosoco-image-dataset. Our method detects more malware and achieves higher F1 and Recall scores than all individual and ensembles of VirusTotal engines, demonstrating its effectiveness and setting a new standard for identifying malware-compromised software containers.
Rotation Invariance in Floor Plan Digitization using Zernike Moments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Nowadays, a lot of old floor plans exist in printed form or are stored as scanned raster images. Slight rotations or shifts may occur during scanning. Bringing floor plans of this form into a machine readable form to enable further use, still poses a problem. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end pipeline that pre-processes the image and leverages a novel approach to create a region adjacency graph (RAG) from the pre-processed image and predict its nodes. By incorporating normalization steps into the RAG feature extraction, we significantly improved the rotation invariance of the RAG feature calculation. Moreover, applying our method leads to an improved F1 score and IoU on rotated data. Furthermore, we proposed a wall splitting algorithm for partitioning walls into segments associated with the corresponding rooms.
Improving Clinical Imaging Systems using Cognition based Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Clinical systems operate in safety-critical environments and are not intended to function autonomously; however, they are currently designed to replicate clinicians' diagnoses rather than assist them in the diagnostic process. To enable better supervision of system-generated diagnoses, we replicate radiologists' systematic approach used to analyze chest X-rays. This approach facilitates comprehensive analysis across all regions of clinical images and can reduce errors caused by inattentional blindness and under reading. Our work addresses a critical research gap by identifying difficult-to-diagnose diseases for clinicians using insights from human vision, enabling these systems to serve as an effective "second pair of eyes". These improvements make the clinical imaging systems more complementary and combine the strengths of human and machine vision. Additionally, we leverage effective receptive fields in deep learning models to present machine-generated diagnoses with sufficient context, making it easier for clinicians to evaluate them.